Live from Riyadh: insider breakdown of the Saudi-US tech summit and Syria sanctions lift

Summary

The Trump-MBS summit in Riyadh on May 13 produced a $600 billion headline commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the US — spanning energy infrastructure, data centers, ports, and oil and gas equipment. A separate $143 billion defense spending agreement was also announced. The numbers are large, but the structure is loose: the capital is expected to flow primarily through infrastructure investment and purchases of American goods, including Nvidia GPUs, rather than through a single fund or vehicle.

Syria sanctions lift

The development that drew the most immediate excitement on the ground was the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. Since the civil war began in 2011, American companies have been largely unable to serve Syrian customers, leaving a market of 23 million people almost entirely to Chinese-sphere technology providers. Syria missed the full web 2.0 and mobile wave as a result. With sanctions gone, the pitch to founders is straightforward: a population with double-digit inflation for a decade is a natural early market for stablecoin-based banking and dollar-denominated payment rails. The argument is that if the Syrian pound is still the dominant currency in five years, the industry will have failed.

GPU exports and AI infrastructure

Jensen Huang's presence on the main stage signaled a softening of US GPU export restrictions to the Gulf. An initial purchase order of approximately 18,000 GPUs has been approved for Saudi Arabia — too small to build a hyperscale cluster on its own, but clearly a first tranche. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund's AI subsidiary, Humain, is expected to purchase hundreds of thousands of advanced GPUs over the next five years, with the first data center planned at roughly half a gigawatt. The shift in language from "data centers" to "AI factories" is deliberate: it lowers the cost of capital for these projects.

Energy

Burning oil to power data centers is an inefficient use of a commodity the kingdom would rather sell. Solar in the desert has underperformed expectations — sand and 130-degree heat cause significant wear on panels and require expensive protective infrastructure. Nuclear is the energy conversation drawing the most serious interest. Some Gulf states with larger natural gas reserves relative to crude have a structural advantage in converting fuel to electricity. Companies capturing excess flare gas to run compute workloads — like Crusoe — represent one near-term model for the region.

Defense

Saudi Ministry of Defense officials at the summit were actively seeking introductions to early-stage US defense startups, specifically naming non-prime upstarts. The appetite for new entrants accelerated after Ukraine demonstrated how quickly battlefield technology requirements can shift. The practical constraint for most founders: Saudi purchase contracts typically can't execute until the US government has validated and approved a system for export to allies, so early conversations are worth starting even if no transaction is imminent.

Crypto

The Saudi Public Investment Fund holds no direct crypto assets as of now, only indirect exposure through downstream fund investments. Crypto is legal in Saudi Arabia, and the kingdom reportedly has the highest individual crypto adoption rate in the Gulf region by number of holders. Family offices are rumored to be building significant positions, though that is difficult to verify. A clearer regulatory framework is expected to emerge as more voices within the Ministry of Finance and the central bank push for formalization. The UAE remains the regional leader for crypto-friendly infrastructure, though its user base skews toward expats rather than citizens — a different profile than Saudi's domestic holders.

Trade war mood

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent opened the day's proceedings with a de-escalatory framing on tariffs, describing the Geneva talks with Chinese counterparts as focused partly on building relationships with second- and third-tier CCP officials who don't share Xi's reported warmth toward Trump. Bessent explicitly said the US does not want to trigger an embargo on Chinese goods. The tone was calm enough that tariffs largely dropped off the day's agenda after his remarks.